A little bit about me

I’m Justin Desilets, born and raised in Michigan, currently living in Utah. I’m a pretty big geek and mountain biker. I currently hold a USAC MTB XC Pro license and work full time at Adobe as a Sr. Systems Engineer.

Notable achievements

  • I’ve been employed at Adobe for almost 12 years. Anyone in the tech industry will recognize that this is a long time to be at a single employer.

  • In 2017 I was hired as a model for the Giant Propel bike release. It’s certainly one of the cooler things I’ve done. You can hopefully still view the original site here. There was a really slick video as well:

    This whole shoot was done over five days. We started out at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Shot all day the first day. Then did some early morning shots the next day in that magic hour light. In the afternoon, we moved up to Park City to film around the Empire Pass area and down on Pine Canyon Road. We filmed a second day up there as well. That evening I went home and washed the kit I had been getting all salty. I then drove out to Wendover to meet back up with the crew to do a couple of file days of shooting on the Salt Flats again. I believe it was Thursday evening when the rain fell and the salt flats were covered in water. This made things really interesting with water and salt spraying all over the place while trying to get the shots we needed. Each pass, we were having to wipe the bike down to try and keep it clean. By the end, the entire bike was caked in salt and I was amazed the Shimano Di2 Dura-Ace gruppo was still shifting.

General Work History

I started my first IT job back in 1999. I worked as a Network Administrator for a few smaller companies. Then was given an offer to work for JPMorgan Chase. I did a lot of end user support and Windows Server management during that time. After about a year and a half, my job was getting dissolved but a Network Engineer position opened up in Reston, VA at the data center we were managing. From there, I was thrust into a hard network role. I had to learn Checkpoint Firewalls, Cisco switches and routers and even all of the Cisco VoIP stuff we were running. There was a CCIE that had put his notice in and I was supposed to fill this role. During this time, we had another Network Engineer leave who was also the only Linux admin in the building. They told me I needed to learn Linux now. I did. It was around 2010 that I took a job at Adobe as a Systems Engineer and have been growing my Linux skill set. This has even extended into software development where I’ve written a few backend programs in Python and Go from scratch.

General Race History

I started taking XC mountain bike racing sersiouly around the same time I started my first IT job. In 2000, I think that’s when I was starting to train every day. I quickly moved up in categories and had a great season in the Expert 19+. From there I moved to Elite and kept at it. In 2005 I won the MMBA point series. When I moved to Virginia for work in 2007, I took a season off. I was burned out from racing and life and I took the time to try and fall back in love with just riding. In 2008, I started racing road and raced up and down the East Coast as a CAT 2 racer. In 2012, I moved to Utah and started mountain biking again. The first seasons I raced expert as I got used to the altituted and riding in real mountains. By the end of the season I had been able to place 3rd for the CAT1 30-35 at USAC MTB Nationals in Sun Valley, ID. After that I put in an upgrade request and received my Pro XC license.